The Crown attorney turns to face a packed third-floor courtroom at Old City Hall.

If the Toronto police officer who issued your ticket isn't around, she says, it is your "lucky day."

What she does not say is if either Michael Thompson or Abdulhameed Virani wrote that ticket the odds are you have just rolled the traffic equivalent of snake eyes.

The veteran officers are the Toronto Police Service's most enthusiastic enforcers of the province's driving laws, with Thompson earning $162,000 in 2008 and Virani $151,000 - almost doubling their salaries due largely to overtime racked up sitting in courtrooms.

Their names appeared on a list released by the city showing who on the force made more than $100,000 a year.

And those pay packets don't include lucrative "paid duty," where off-duty officers, paid by private companies, earn between $60 and $70 an hour to perform a host of duties, such as directing traffic around construction sites.

"It's the best game in town," Mike Walt, a retired police officer turned paralegal, said of the money officers can earn from overtime.

And as the Toronto Police Accountability Coalition noted in its most recent bulletin, the number of highly paid officers is climbing rapidly.

In 2008, 1,006 employees of the Toronto police service earned more than $100,000, including 628 staff members whose base salary is normally under $100,000. Four years ago, in 2004, there were 250 earning more than $100,000 and in 2006, 708.

"How long do we think we can afford this as a city that's basically bankrupt?" said John Sewell, a former Toronto mayor who runs TPAC. "We don't have extra money for anything we'd like and yet the police are walking away with all of this money."

Under the Toronto Police Association collective agreement, police officers who attend court as witnesses during a scheduled off day are paid a minimum four hours, at 1.5 times their basic wage, even if the appearance lasts for 10 minutes. Officers receive three hours of pay at time and a half if they appear in court before beginning a regularly scheduled shift.

There is no cap on how many overtime hours an officer can work.

One recent day at Old City Hall court, Virani showed up in uniform just before 1:30 p.m., newspaper in hand. He took his seat close to other officers also waiting for their cases to be called. While they chatted and joked, he kept his head down and read. On this day, he was up on his feet a couple of times, notepad in hand, to schedule future trial dates at the request of the ticketed driver or agent. No trials were held and he left by 3:30.

Virani is "always in court," said Joseph McKinnon, a licensed paralegal and another former Toronto police officer.

Mostly he is there to testify about "pro-turns," added McKinnon, using slang for prohibited turns.

Is he good value for Toronto taxpayers?

"He is enforcing," said McKinnon, adding he, too, was also a "high producer" - writing a lot of tickets when he was a cop. The alternative, scheduling court time for police officers while they are on shift, is problematic since that takes cops off the road.

On another day, when a reporter asked Virani about his penchant for overtime, he declined to comment.

Meanwhile in courtroom B on yet another day, before he began his regular night shift, Thompson spent less than an hour in court on one matter.

Described by colleagues as personable, polite and hard working, he has been on the force for 23 years and is a breath technician, his expertise often bringing him to criminal court.

"It is what it is," he said outside of court.

"I work hard for the money," he said outside court. "I don't think there's anyone who knows me who would say different."

His fellow officers say as much. "He's an amazing guy," said one. "When people drive away (after getting a ticket) they have a good impression."

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Excluding parking tickets, some 700,000 charges a year are laid under both provincial statutes and municipal bylaws, 85 per cent of them relating to traffic and driving offences.

It costs the city about $40 million to administer the court services relating to traffic tickets, which includes the costs of justices of the peace, prosecutors and interpreters.

Six million dollars of that goes to pay the overtime costs for police officers who attend traffic court, although not all of that money is paid out in cash since some take overtime in time owing. (An additional $10 million is spent in overtime costs for police to attend court as witnesses in criminal cases.)

That means $8 million in net profit after expenses is collected annually relating to traffic violations.

About one in four charges results in a guilty plea and payment with no trial being required. Another quarter are convicted after not responding to a ticket. In those cases, the courts issue fine notices.

About half of the charges result in the person asking for a trial. Of those cases, about 20 per cent who ask for a trial do not show up and are convicted in their absence, so a fine is imposed. About 35 per cent plead guilty or are found guilty with the remainder of the cases dismissed or withdrawn in court, sometimes because the officer fails to appear.

But many officers do because it is so lucrative to attend court.

The city is currently building six more courtrooms to accommodate the volume ticket able offences that come to court.

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"He'd give his mother a ticket."

Virani is a 10-year veteran of the $100,000-plus club.

Among rank-and-file officers, the knock against Virani is that he "doesn't forgive anybody." He is also known as a paid-duty "hound," which strikes some colleagues as unfair.

One fellow officer told of a night, in the entertainment district, when he and his colleagues allowed a man to park his car illegally for a few minutes while he ran into a nightclub to find his daughter.

Virani came along and asked if they planned to issue a ticket. The officers said no, Virani persisted but was shouted down.

A traffic officer who has worked on the same shift as Virani said he lacked diplomacy.

"I may need you as a witness in a criminal offence one day so the human part has to be there," he said. Focusing on "the almighty dollar that you make from court cards" isn't a good thing.

Virani was also linked to the entertainment district scandal. In a 2007 ruling, Superior Court Justice Frank Marrocco wrote there was a "reasonable inference," based on wiretaps, that former Toronto Police Association president Ricky McIntosh, who faces a series of corruption charges, another officer named Nick Guastadisegni, and Virani had agreed to withdraw a charge of making a prohibited left turn against a man "without any legitimate discretionary reason for the withdrawal."

In 2007, Virani was charged with misconduct under the Police Services Act and docked 10 days pay for withdrawing the ticket.

At the sentencing hearing, one of his superiors noted Virani's "impressive work ethic" and said he considered him to be a "conscientious workaholic." He also praised him for treating the public with respect, following orders and carrying out any detail.

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Officially, police claim not to be in the business of generating revenue, "there's lots of pressure to write tickets, no ifs, ands or buts," says one former traffic officer who did not want to be named. "It's tickets, tickets, tickets. I've seen guys get in s**t if they didn't write their numbers."

Some paralegals estimate that a police officer could issue up to 400 tickets a month.

Under the law, officers are required to appear in court when someone wants to fight a ticket.

"There's not really any discretion," said Barry Randell, director of court services City of Toronto

Officials try to schedule officers so they appear on several matters at once.

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Good, efficient enforcement is key to keeping roads safe, says Brian Patterson, president of the Ontario Safety League. But merely writing and fighting tickets in court won't rid the streets of dangerous drivers.

The current system enables people to walk away from tickets with lesser fines or fewer demerit points, Patterson says, but it doesn't make them better drivers.

"The reason we have enforcement should be re-education, not collection."

There are many dedicated traffic officers who won't let people off the hook just because the system is bloated, he says.

But instead of ending up in court, drivers should be given the option of enrolling in re-education classes because, Patterson says, there are some people out there "who don't even know the rules."

Such options would unclog the system immediately, Patterson says and produce safer drivers.

"The tools are out there to fix the system," he says.

Patterson also believes in getting certified statements from traffic officers instead of having them in the courtroom just to defend the facts of the case.

"At the end of the day we're just burning up time and resources and making the system less workable," he says.

Randell admits that when it comes to fighting the Highway Traffic Act in court, there are myriad inefficiencies.

The city and province, he said, are looking at ways to streamline the process "to make it less cumbersome and less costly."

Paying an officer to be present to defend each ticket he writes isn't cost effective - especially if many of those visits are just to set another date.

While officials try to book an officer's tickets all on the same day in courtrooms dedicated to specific offences, it is often difficult to do so.

Officials are looking at many ways to replace an officer's in-person testimony, including replacing his or her live statements with a certified document.

Making those changes would involve rewriting law, says Toronto Police Association head Dave Wilson, which is not a domain of the police. However, he says, the ticket is already a certified statement, so there is no need for another. And, if someone wants to contest the facts in court, the officer must be present to defend his decision.

Trying to replace an officer's live testimony with a pre-written statement, "doesn't make any sense at all," Wilson says. "It goes against the whole legal system."

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